In those pretty monsters who came under the tables
where I sat eating apples and my brother cried. In there
the flower slime was a comfort. Their falling voices
made my eyes pink. They threw me
away. In their jaws I was safe.

This lunging, these breaths. I hear their mewling
still. The sidewalk lurches upward, sucks me back.
Those things my mother used to read, the half-unbuttoned
blouses of women, the moustached men, the edges
of the page painted red or yellow, the carved out hole
with a face sticking through you always had to
look inside. Look there. Go there. Come

in those monsters. Those sidewinding wrecks.
Those jabberwocks, those mammoths, those precocious
brats with evil laughs could not come in
between the glass. I kept them out with my green hair.
I locked them away and saved them in a drawer.
I miss them. The loves of my life. Those books.

Slumber Party at the Aquarium

Janie puts her sleeping bag
in front of the shark tank, because
Lucy is by the jelly fish and Janie
hates Lucy. Sarah and ChaVonne
stake out the moray eel. Mrs. Talbot
and Mrs. Trith fall in
with the piranhas, and soon the girls
form city-states, draft constitutions,
make war. The lobsters
look on, idly tapping
their claws.